


Metallic Tenderness

by stormae



Category: NCT (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Robots & Androids, Angst, But only if you squint, Comfort, F/M, Fluff, like...lots, the robot version of a panic attack
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-22
Updated: 2017-04-22
Packaged: 2018-10-22 13:27:23
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,903
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10697961
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stormae/pseuds/stormae
Summary: Mark was your companion robot, and you adored him with every fibre of your being, but he wasn’t a very good one.





	Metallic Tenderness

YEAR 2053

It had been a very, very long time since you’d stopped to think about it. It rarely ever crossed your mind, nowadays. They’re so commonplace that you struggled to even imagine a time when they weren’t omnipresent. You had grown up during the fifth technological revolution, and as a consequence had lived a very different life and held a very different mindset to that of your parents, and their parents before them. Hell, your grandparents probably wouldn’t have even been able to fathom your world.

The year you were born coincided with the first ever mass-produced robot—a military design that came out of Russia. Since then, society seemed to recognise robots as a feasible actuality. Companies were quick to privatise the idea, patenting different designs and figuring out how to economically mass-produce robots for the public. These companies had accurately guessed that robots were the way of the future.

Robots, androids, automatons, machines, whatever term you desired, were now so seamlessly integrated into society that they made up just over 25% of the population residing on the planet at any given moment. They were durable and industrious but obedient and easily upgradable when they became outdated, and employers didn’t have to deal with embittered long-term employees or unions when they wanted to up-skill their workforce.

Even if your grandparents or your great-grandparents had given the thought of automated beings roaming the earth any real weight, the robots of today were a far cry from the old movies you’d seen from the beginning of the century. In those films, robots were unthinking, unfeeling, seven foot tall, shiny metal humanoids with a limited vocabulary and hands that shifted into automatic machine guns at the click of a button.

No, robots were nothing like that. Given, the first ones were hulking and intimidating, but from their inception, robots had been startling human. For the past ten years, scientists and engineers had been perfecting what they dubbed the ‘soul strings’ of a bot—the system that allowed the artificial intelligence to learn from its surroundings the same way a human does. They study the way others display emotions, the way they react to situations and circumstances, they learn from TV shows and movies and the humans and robots around them. They develop such an intricate understanding of human nature that they can use their knowledge to react individually and uniquely to their surroundings. This made them almost indiscernible from humans, unless you knew what you were looking for. A very faint ring of red lingers on the edge of a robot’s iris, indicating they were on and functioning correctly. If a robot begins to malfunction or needs to charge, the red encroaches on the colour of the eye, until the orb becomes completely crimson and the robot shuts down completely.

Robots were so normal these days that you could buy a robot for pretty much any purpose without breaking the bank. Take yourself, for example. This year had seen you enter your first year of college—the experience requiring you to move quite a distance from home and into an apartment within the city of Seoul. The proximity to your university was the biggest draw card, but the little roof-top space and the sliding glass doors made the entire space feel brighter and larger than it really was. You had fallen in love with the place almost instantaneously.

You also didn’t have to worry about the drawbacks of living alone, or even looking after yourself. As many parents chose to in the new day and age, they had been saving money for the better part of the last fifteen years to purchase a companion bot for you when you graduated high school and left home.

Companion bots were meant to look after their patron, keeping them company whilst ensuring they were safe and their basic needs were met. Sometimes that was where the relationship between patron and robot ended, but more often than not the personable robots and their cohabitants developed a far deeper bond. As the robots were entirely capable of feeling, caring and loving, person and android frequently became friends, best friends, lovers and enemies. If it were not for the fact you had to take a robot back to its producer to get them remodelled so you can tell they’re ageing, robots were as real and autonomous as humans. They were so unbelievably lifelike, down to the simulated breathing that had their shoulders and chests rising and falling.

And that brought back to your situation at hand.

Had someone from an alternate universe walked through your door, one where robots were still a figment of the futuristic imagination, they would have seen little more than a young couple consisting of a perennially overworked and under-rested girl and a somehow always magnificently vibrant and semi-exhausting to watch boy.

But it was you who walked through the door, and you were from your universe, and you understood that the young man, Mark, was not a man at all. You knew that if you found the slits at the nape of his neck or on the inside of his wrist and peeled them back, you’d find a magnesium skeleton underneath.

Mark was your companion robot, and you adored him with every fibre of your being, but he wasn’t a very good one.

Purchasing a robot was like purchasing a car. You could get ones that cost millions of dollars and were top of the range, you could buy high performing bots, you could get your hands on good/ok/mediocre androids, or you could scrape together a few hundred bucks and get an amalgamation of metal that was barely functioning but would probably get the job done, if you tilted your head and squinted. Mark was certainly no hunk of junk, but he was also definitely not top of the line or the best money could buy. He had moments of malfunction fairly regularly, making him an incredibly clumsy companion robot, but you didn’t mind. It made him more real to you. You loved him because of the way his finger joints would lock and unlock without command or warning, or how sometimes he would stop walking for no reason other than his legs had just decided they’d had enough for the moment and needed a second to recuperate.

As you walked through the door to your apartment after a day at university, you experienced first hand how clumsy the robot boy could be.

“Home,” you called out in an extended, sing song tone to alert your boyfriend of your presence.

There was a pause, before you heard his smooth voice exclaim your name, followed by the sound of china smashing against the tiles of your kitchen floor.

You removed your shoes in the entry way and rounded the corner into the kitchen, where you found Mark at the sink, evidently midway through washing dishes, now staring, flabbergasted, at the pieces of plate at his feet.

He glanced from the numerous shards that once fit together as a whole to you, then back at the broken plate, before finally resting his wide eyes on your silent form.

“I’m sorry,” he blurted out, as he did when he did anything wrong. “I’m so sorry. I got—I got excited when I heard you come home and I clenched my hand and I forgot about my strength and the plate just disintegrated in my hand and I’m so sorry I’ll go to the store and buy new ones tomorrow first thing before you even wake up you won’t even know there was ever one missing I’ll buy a whole new set—”

You dropped your backpack on the counter and shuffled towards him, careful to avoid puncturing your feet with the sharp pieces of plate, and framed his face with your hands, effectively shutting him up.

You chuckled at his panicky expression, the reddening ears and saucer-sized eyes classic signs of a frantically apologetic Mark. The first time you’d seen him in this state you’d been shocked that he actually seemed to blush despite his fundamental lack of blood or veins, but apparently it was one of the many aspects of his design that made him more human.

“Mark,” you told him firmly but making sure he could see you were smiling, “I don’t care. Honestly. At all. It’s fine.”

“Are you sure?”

“I’m sure.”

If you got mad at the boy for every glass he shattered or plate he dropped, your relationship wouldn’t work. It wasn’t more than two hours later that he snapped a table lamp in half trying to turn it on—a momentary lapse causing him to forget his strength all over again. The damage sent him spiralling into apologetic mode once again, but that was another aspect of him that you didn’t see as a fault. Any excuse to cradle his face between your hands and get close enough to see your reflection in his dark brown eyes was a good thing, as far as you were concerned.

In the first few months of your time together, however, it had been a primary source of uneasiness for Mark. Aside from the fact you had to keep replacing the things he snapped, smashed and shattered, he was constantly fearful of scaring you or forgetting his strength in a way that would harm you.

It had not taken you long, though, to come to the realisation that he was physically incapable of doing you any harm. He was always gentle, holding you with the delicacy of a collector holding a prized antiquity. He was never not thinking about you and how he could make you more comfortable, happier, more at ease, so much so that you struggled to reciprocate the affection.

Curled up on the couch nearing one in the morning, having spent the afternoon, evening and night watching the third reboot of the Harry Potter franchise—this time most of the cast were robots—you felt sleep toying with the edges of your consciousness. You felt the weariness pulling you under, and tried to wriggle further into your blanket cocoon to guard yourself against the angry bite of the cold air in your apartment.

Mark was positioned behind you, cradling you against his body, chin resting on the top of your head as he watched the fourth movie come to an end.

“I still think the second version is the best,” Mark commented, something he said every time the pair of you watched either the first or the third. He waited for you to agree, as you always did, but was met with silence. “Y/N?”

Your breathing was slow and deep, your eyes closed and your features relaxed. He just watched you for a moment, studying the slopes and plains of your face, tempted to reach up and trace a finger over the soft skin of your cheek or brush the hairs of your eyebrows into place where they had been pushed into disarray when you rubbed your eyes half an hour ago. Your features scrunched together momentarily as you pulled your arms closer to yourself and pushed your body closer to Mark’s, seeking respite from the cold.

Mark didn’t take notice of variances in temperature as small as the changing seasons, but he always noticed it when you did. Normally his body is quite cool to the touch, as he doesn’t have blood and fat to produce body heat. But in winter, on chilly nights like these when you were too cheap to bite the bullet and turn on the heater, he would hold you particularly close and gently raise the temperature of his body until it was pleasantly warm. When asked, he would say he did this for you, but if he was being honest, his motives were selfish.

When you felt the blissful heat coming from his surprisingly comfortable chest and torso, you would move closer and hug him tighter, and he would have an excuse to bury his face in your hair and wish that he could smell the scent of your shampoo or the perfume he bought you for your birthday. But he makes do with simply holding you against his body with delicate care and peppering your face with kisses and being able to rest assured that you were safe and content.

Sometimes obligations got in the way, and you had to sit down at the dining table with your headphones in your ears, blaring white noise in order to finish work that so desperately needed doing. When you left the real world for a more productive world of you own, Mark found himself instantly and incurably bored.

It was at times like those when his companion settings kicked into gear, and he busied himself by tidying up around the house, returning everything to where it belonged. Whilst in your room, he was putting things in your drawer when he came across a glasses case he didn’t remember seeing before. Upon inspection, the case contained your previous glasses, round and frameless, channeling the Harry Potter trope he was always so interested in. He slipped them on his face, glancing in your vanity mirror to see if he resembled his favourite character. Unfortunately, the artificial blond hair took away from any chance he’d had to start with.

He was about to take them off and put them back—he had the sort of perfect vision a human would never be capable of, even with the prescription distorting his normal sight—but he was distracted by your mellifluous voice calling him from the kitchen.

“Mark?”

“Yeah?” He responded, leaving the draw open and moving towards your voice.

“Would you please be able to get me a cup of tea?”

You came into sight as he rounded the corner, your hair scrunched in a bun to keep it out of your face, your current glasses about to slip off your nose, purple bags beginning to ring your eyes. The sight of you tugged at his soul strings more and more with every time he laid eyes on you.

He smiled and nodded, “English? Green? Rooibos?”

He began to move towards the kitchen, but paused when you didn’t answer him for a moment. He turned back to you and lifted an eyebrow, mildly surprised to see a subdued wash of colour tinging your cheeks as you looked at him. This spurred his own embarrassment, although he couldn’t fathom why you were so intent on looking at him.

“Y/N?” He prompted you, “Which tea?”

“English,” you blurted out, the red of your cheeks darkening, “English, please.”

If there was one thing he was good at making, it was tea. Mostly because he was most practiced at it. When he had made it the way you like it and brought it back to where you were studying, he was taken aback when you reached up and pressed a finger delicately to the tip of his nose.

“You look really cute in those glasses,” you acknowledged, the smile on your face far less bashful than you had been before, “I never even thought about you wearing them.”

“Well, it’s not like I actually need them,” he said, purely because he never knew what to say when you complimented him like that.

“You can keep them, if you want,” you told him, thanking him for the tea and replacing the earbuds in your ears. Mark knew the tips of his ears were turning pink, but he kept the useless glasses on his face for the rest of the day.

When the seasons transitioned from frigid winter to a far more agreeable spring, you and Mark would spend the nights of the latter end of the season out ofn the rooftop balcony attached to the apartment, watching the sun dip below the horizon as the moon took its place and the stars tried their hardest to compete against the vibrant neons of Seoul below.

You would take a blanket and pillows out there and prop yourself against the wall, bringing Mark’s head to rest in your lap. Mark was never as enraptured by sunsets as you were. You loved the way the sky transitioned from a clear cerulean blue to a gradient of pale pinks and tangerines and bright oranges to dusky purples and finally a wash of inky blue that plunges the world into night. Mark just loved watching you watch the sky.

You would slip your fingers through his hair, letting your nails scrape against his scalp and tug any knots from the tresses. For situations like those he heightened his pleasure and pain receptors, yet another aspect of bots that made them more human, so that he could feel your touch against his head. As you braided and unbraided tiny portions of his hair, his fingers and toes curled and uncurled, and he started to make a low, steady sound from somewhere deep within him.

Your hand stopped, and he opened his eyes questioningly.

“Are you purring?” You asked in astonishment. His ears immediately alighted red.

“No,” he told you, “my circuits are humming.”

You muffled a laugh and went back to massaging his head, “Sounds a lot like purring to me.”

“I’m not a cat.”

“Ok, ok,” you said, finding amusement in the way he became so immediately defensive, “whatever you say.”

Mark tended to take his ‘responsibility to protect you’ very seriously.

One evening, far too late to watch the day transition to night, you returned home after staying late at university in an attempt to get a group project finished. Your partner had spent the entire time laying into you about how your work was substandard and would bring the grade down, and after several hours of deprecating harassment, you were in a mood that would put the devil to shame.

Mark had picked up on your sour state as soon as you walked through the door of the apartment. He stood from where he’d been seated on the couch, watching as you stepped out of your shoes, dropped your bag on the floor and proceeded to sigh as dramatically as you could manage. He made his way over to you and gently took your hand, leading you to the bedroom, where he wrapped you in blankets, not to stave off the cold but to give you a sense of comfort, and laid you down in the bed. He crawled onto the mattress beside you and wrapped his arms around your bundled-up body, resting his chin in the crook of your shoulder and pressing kisses to your skin between soothing sounds and stroking hands. He just held you like that until some of the tension had escaped your body.

Then he got up, ordering you to stay put, daring you to move a muscle and see what the repercussions would be, before scurrying off to the kitchen to make you hot chocolate. Again, not because cold weather necessitated it, but simply because hot chocolate soothed all woes. It took him several tries to make one that wasn’t gritty or too sweet or too watery, but once he had made the perfect cup he brought it back to you.

You wriggled your hands free from the body-wrap of blankets and propped yourself up against the headboard so as not to choke on all of Mark’s hard work, expecting him to just lay down beside you again. Instead, he retrieved his guitar from where it was in its case by the door, sitting on the bed beside you before starting to strum a slow, mellow tune. He hummed along to the song, a faintly recognisable strain that you were sure Mark was making a million times better, just because he was the one playing it.

The soothing sounds of his fingers flawlessly performing every note completed the process of calming you down, the stress from the day seemingly hundreds of miles from where you were in that moment.

The combination of blankets and hot chocolate and the melodious acoustic guitar had sleep seeping into your bones. Mark noticed the way your eyelids were struggling to remain open, your blinking becoming slower and slower and your breathing evening out. He set the guitar down and unraveled your blanket cocoon, spreading the duvet over the entire bed, before getting under the covers with you and tugging you against his chest. Your hands laid flat against his body, right above where you would have been able to feel a normal, beating heart. Instead his chest was silent, the only sound being the infinitesimal whirring of the electronic systems within his body that no human would ever be able to hear, no matter how close they pressed their ear. He could hear your heartbeat, though, amid the silence of the room. It brought him peace.

He brushed the hair away from your eyes and pressed a kiss to your forehead, before closing his own eyes and letting the systems inside his body slow down, being able to totally relax knowing his job was done.

Normally, Mark savoured his ability to feel emotions. When watching the old robot movies you managed to haul out of the archive, he always pitied the androids portrayed as having no feelings. But sometimes he had to admit they were certainly a hindrance.

When an old friend returned to Seoul after moving away during high school several years ago, you naturally organised to catch up with her almost right away. You went round to her place for dinner with little more than your transport card slipped into the back of your phone case, not thinking that you’d need anything more than that.

But amidst talking and eating the clock ticked past midnight and you realised you had missed the last train home, and you didn’t have any means of money on you for a cab. Your friend immediately offered for you to stay over, and you accepted immediately. Your phone remained on the kitchen counter where you’d left it on the way in, face down and on silent. The pair of you watched movies and ran your mouths late into the night, meaning you didn’t wake up until past 10am the next morning.

It had been a long time since you’d woken without arms wrapped around you and a cup of coffee waiting to be reheated on your bedside table, so when you woke without either, you most certainly noticed. It took you a moment to clear your mind of the fuzz of sleep, and another to realise you had never told Mark you wouldn’t be coming home last night.

You vaulted from the bed, disturbing your still dozing friend, and scrambled to where you phone had been sitting, untouched. You frantically tapped the home button, but the screen failed to illuminate, the battery entirely dead.

“Stupid iPhone,” you swore at the device under your breath, before pocketing it and moving back towards the bedroom to bid a hurried and apologetic goodbye to your sleepy friend and proceeding quickly out the door.

The trains were late and seemed to travel too slow. When you finally did get to stumble through the door, you were met by a very worked up Mark. His hair was sticking up at all angles and you could see his thumbs ticking and twitching the way they do when he gets anxious, and you instantaneously felt guilt eat your heart whole.

Upon hearing the door open he froze mid-pace and swung to look at you. Relief overcame any anxiety and frustration on his face as he closed the distance between you and him. He wrapped his arms around you and you returned the hug, but realised something was wrong when he didn’t say anything.

“Mark,” you tried, wriggling in his hold, but you realised he was stiffer than usual. It took you only a moment to realise what had happened.

The same thing had occurred a couple of times before. When Mark experienced an emotion too suddenly or strongly, it overwhelms his circuits and he freezes and shuts down. A robot coping mechanism, if you will.

You pried his inelastic arms off of you and placed them back by his side, taking a step back to get a better look at him. His eyes, once a warm brown rimmed faintly with red, were a solid black from inner corner to outer.

Last time he shut down, Mark had come back on within fifteen minutes, so you decided to leave him where he was. You propped yourself up against the closest wall and wrapped your arms around yourself, unable to tear your concerned eyes from Mark’s frozen figure.

But fifteen minutes soon passed, and then twenty, then half an hour. After forty-five minutes you decided to expend the effort to manoeuvre him into a more comfortable position, carefully moving each leg independently to transport him to the couch. Once he was seated, upright and rigid, you sat down in the chair adjacent, hands folded in front of your face as you continued to watch him.

Every now and then you thought you saw a twitch of the fingers or the flutter of eyes moving under eyelids, but they were all just tricks of your imagination.

It took three days for Mark to reboot and turn on again. You had barely moved from that armchair, only to eat irregularly and take showers, so you were poised and ready to jump into action as soon as he woke.

His eyes snapped open and immediately focused on you, a pure, terrifying crimson that slowly faded to barely a ring around his familiar brown irises. There was a palpable pause, before you flung yourself towards him, sitting yourself in his lap as your hands fluttered around his face, tugging at his now mobile muscles.

His arms went around your waist and he let you fret silently for a while, before grabbing your wrists gently and bringing your knuckles to his lips. You released an audible sigh, dropping your forehead to his shoulder and taking deep breaths to steady your heart rate.

“I’m sorry I worried you,” were the first words that left his mouth. Your head snapped back up as you gaped at him in disbelief.

“Are you kidding me right now?”

He tilted his head, “No?”

“Why are you sorry?” You were genuinely baffled, “It should be me saying sorry.”

It was his turn to be bewildered, “What? Why?”

You took his face in your hands in an effort to convey your point to him, “Because I didn’t tell you the address of where I was going and then I didn’t tell you that I would be staying overnight and I left you in the dark when I should have known not knowing would worry you beyond belief because it’s basically your job to worry about me.” You took a deep breath. “I freaked you out so much it took you three whole days to recover and reboot. I’m sorry.”

He smoothed his hands over your hair, watching you with a fond smile, “It’s fine, as long as you’re fine. I’m still sorry for worrying you while I was shut down. I know how much it would freak me out if you slept for three days straight. Oh wait,” he cocked his head to the side in recollection, “you do do that sometimes.”

You gently hit your fist against his metal chest, knowing he’d barely feel a tickle, “I do not. Lazing in bed and sleeping seventy-two hours straight are two very different things.”

He chuckled, bringing your forehead to his lips before tucking you closer into his chest. The pair of you sat there in each others embrace until the day transformed to dusk transformed to night, saying nothing and relishing in each other’s presence.

Every morning, Mark took it upon himself to bring you back a coffee from the local cafe. The coffee was always cold by the time you eventually heaved yourself from bed, as he made sure to get up and retrieve it an hour before you were due to wake up, and you were sure with practice he would be able to make an excellent cup of caffeine, but he had ulterior motives. And those motives came in the form of the barista robot that made said coffees.

Donghyuck was certainly Mark’s closest friend. An impish robot with the exterior of a young boy, fresh faced and bright eyed, Donghyuck enchanted everyone he met.

Mark had asked you one day whether you would be fine with Donghyuck coming over to stay one night, and with one imploring look from Mark you were giving in. Not that you would ever truly say no, but you had a sneaking suspicion Mark enjoyed using his charm on you.

What you had not been prepared for was the hurricane that was Service Robot Lee Donghyuck. Due to the demands of his job, he was inherently outgoing, with a loud voice and a commanding presence that beseeched anyone within a five meter radius to pay attention to every word that came from his mouth.

He brought out the best and brightest in Mark, as well. As soon as Donghyuck stepped foot in your home, he and Mark were fountains of inside jokes and laughter that had you smiling and giggling along, despite the fact you had almost no clue what they were both on about.

You left them mostly to their own devices, curling up in your bedroom to read your book as they dominated the living space, but as it darkened outside you found them both standing in the doorway.

“Y/N,” Donghyuck said with that perfect, pixie-like smile, “as a thanks for letting me stay over, could we cook you dinner tonight?”

Had Mark offered, you would have politely declined, knowing it would lead to chaos and destruction, but you figured Donghyuck was a service bot, after all, and surely he knew the extent of his capabilities.

You should have known a calamity would follow when Mark informed Donghyuck that he’d help.

The first few moments were relatively quiet as the pair attempted to find a recipe they could make that wasn’t ramen but wasn’t beyond their culinary capabilities. It sounded like it was going ok, from what you could hear. Giggling and audible confusion as they searched the kitchen for what they required, but no more banging and crashing than you’d expect. You allowed yourself to become reabsorbed in your book, deciding not to worry about the androids in the kitchen, to have a little more faith.

You regretted your decision when you heard the unmistakable sound of glass hitting tiles, followed by a profane exclamation and two more shattered object. As you folded the corner of the page you were on and closed your book, you heard the sound of a pot clanging against the floor, which spurred you to move faster towards the kitchen.

When you rounded the corner and saw the remnants of two glass mixing bowls, a destroyed measuring cup and a pot full of soggy noodles on the floor, you banished them from the kitchen.

After you had cooked yourself dinner and sat yourself at the kitchen counter with your book, Mark and Donghyuck appeared from the living room with sheepish expressions and a guitar.

“As an apology,” Donghyuck explained, “do you think we could perform something for you?”

You nodded eagerly, setting your book down and giving the pair of boyish bots your undivided attention. You knew from first hand experience that Mark was exceptional with a guitar in hand, but you had not clue what his companion was gifted with.

Mark leant against the back of the couch whilst Donghyuck stood, the opening chords to a familiar tune filling the apartment as Mark commenced the song.

Nothing could have prepared you for Donghyuck’s voice. For such a boisterous, larger than life personality, the boy had the voice of an angel.

“I’ve been talking to myself, lately,” he crooned, clear voice melting perfectly with the melody floating from the space between the guitar strings and Mark’s fingers, “I’ve been asking for advice, oh… I’ve been, slowly loosening my grip on this reality… Tongue-tied, the dominoes break…”

Donghyuck and Mark performed the entire song from memory, which really shouldn’t have shocked you, with their supposedly impeccable mechanical memory, and by the time they let the last note disperse into the air, you were struggling to find words.

“That was astonishing,” you told them, trying to convey how amazed you were with just your words, “really.”

As soon as the song was over, Donghyuck reverted to his usual self, energy and excitement thrumming off him in waves.

“When Mark was getting his guitar I saw you guys have Mario Kart?” He asked, bouncing up and down on the balls of his feet.

“Be careful,” you warned, “Mark’s really good at it.”

Donghyuck raised a finger to your boyfriend’s face, “I’ll crush you,” before disappearing towards the TV. Mark dropped a kiss on your temple and followed his friend.

The distinctive Nintendo music echoing from the living room persisted for the next several hours, and it wasn’t until the numbers on the digital clock were ticking through the single digits of the early morning that you decided to ask them to at least turn the volume down a little. But when you entered the living room and found the track selection menu sitting on the screen and the two boys slumped against each other on the couch, eyes closed and recharging, you assumed being in each other’s presences must have really drained their batteries. Donghyuck’s head was resting against Mark’s shoulder, the older looking robot sitting with his head tipped straight back.

Your mind was telling you that they didn’t need it, but your conscience wouldn’t let you go to bed without laying a blanket over the pair of them, removing the controllers from their hands and turning off the console and 1the TV. As you tucked yourself into bed, you found that you were more eager to sleep than you had realised.

You dragged yourself out of bed the next morning to bid Donghyuck goodbye, before returning to the solace of your still-warm blankets. You were still feeling drained, as if you hadn’t slept long enough or deep enough, but you half suspected that was due to Mark’s absence by your side the night prior.

You were propped up against the headboard with your glasses on your face and a mug of coffee in your hands that Donghyuck had prepared especially for you before he left.

Mark clambered into the bed beside you, wrapping an arm around your shoulders and tugging you against his side, resting his cheek on the top of your head. He kissed your cheek for at least the fourth time that morning, a habit you hoped he’d never break.

“I love you,” he told you, the words escaping his lips and floating into the airy nothingness of the early morning light that filtered through the sheer curtains and washed the room in yellows and whites.

You reached up with your free hand to run your fingers through his hair, the circuits within his chest immediately humming at the sensation. As he purred beside you, you couldn’t imagine a way to be unhappy in that moment.

“I love you too.”


End file.
